ONE OF THE CHEAPEST BUT MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS TO GET NEW CUSTOMERS FOR ANY BUSINESS BUSINESS HOW-TO
By working on creating a win-win relationship with partners, you can grow your business and end up with a lower overall customer acquisition cost when the partnerships are structured correctly.
doesn’t have a critical mass of customers that would be a good fit for the first partner.
In this new economy, one of the areas you should focus on is what we at The Newsletter Pro call partnerships. A partner is another business that isn’t a competitor but shares customers with your business, and you both can potentially benefit from the relationship. For example, dentists sometimes have patients who would be better served by orthodontists. Plumbers serve homeowners who would also make a good fit for HVAC companies. Some of the gurus who teach entrepreneurs how to build their businesses make good partners for The Newsletter Pro.
In these situations, you can still set up a partnership — typically a paid partnership where the second partner pays a “per lead” or “per sale” fee to the first partner for each referral or sale. The benefit to the first partner is two-fold. First, they get paid for leads they would otherwise be paying for, which lowers their overall customer acquisition cost. Second, they get to add value to their customers and leads by offering the services or products the second partner offers without spending any of their own expenses. One-sided partnerships are very valuable, as long as one person doesn’t get greedy or lazy. If one does, these partnerships typically break down. 2. TWO-SIDED PARTNERSHIPS This is where the partners can literally trade leads back and forth because both companies have an offering that benefits the customer. For example, if you sell digital marketing services to companies and I sell print newsletters, we’re not competitors, but we service the same types of customers. So we could swap leads back and forth. In theory, if we got the same number of leads, we’d effectively be doubling the number of leads we each get. Of course, if we don’t get the same number of leads, there needs to be a mechanism to equal out the lead flow, but that can be worked out in the same manner as a one-sided partnership. With partnerships, you can clearly track where leads are coming from and what your overall customer acquisition cost is. As an added benefit, leads referred via a partner program are typically some of the least expensive customers a business can get, making this program all the more beneficial. –Shaun
There are two primary types of partnerships.
1. ONE-SIDED PARTNERSHIP This is a partnership where the first partner has a group of customers that would be good for the second partner, but the second partner
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